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Talk:Sam Yeager
Shouldn't there be a reaction for Sam's response to Indianapolis' destruction. I mean without it, it would make Sam somewhat 'careless' about what he had done.--Drgyen 21:40, April 7, 2010 (UTC) :This is more a biographical article. I don't see much opportunity for getting deeply into his feelings. Since he's a character in a novel instead of a real historical figure, we have the advantage of being privy to those feelings, and can describe them accurately, but I still don't think they'd fit. Besides, I don't remember him becoming terribly emotional. A certain sorrow that more people had had to die, but this was outweighed by his grim determination that he'd done the right thing. Turtle Fan 01:46, April 8, 2010 (UTC) ::Well put it hardly, after reading some of the books (skimming it though), I understand some fan-reactions of reviling Sam. Also I want to know if the people of the world were aware of WHY Indianapolis was nuked.--Drgyen 02:05, April 8, 2010 (UTC) :::I wasn't impressed with the raging debate over his morality. I generally lack interest in artificially constructed moral dilemmas. But yes, the reason for Atvar's attack was public knowledge. What Atvar hoped to accomplish by giving Warren this alternative instead of saying "Disarm or we kill you, motherfucker" I never understood. Less still why, if Warren was going to give Atvar a free shot at a city, he used it on a meaningless one-horse town like Indiannapolis instead of NYC or LA. Turtle Fan 02:14, April 8, 2010 (UTC) ::::Well, the Race was rather hurting after the war with Germany, plus Molotov made it clear that a war with the US was a war with the USSR as well, which the Race just couldn't afford at that point. I think Atvar made the offer on the assumption that Warren wouldn't go for it, and was preparing for war when Warren said yes. TR 03:21, April 8, 2010 (UTC) :::::Atvar would have been badly hurt fighting both the Soviet Union and the United States, but he would have won, and once that war ended, he'd be done; Tosev 3 would finally be a Lizard world, with no one remaining to challenge him. The US knew this; Warren said as much in his funeral address. Given the choice simply of disarming or being destroyed, I believe it was quite clear he would have chosen disarmament and tried to circumvent the restrictions imposed upon him. :::::Atvar is one of my all-time favorite antagonists and he's certainly my favorite Turtledovean villain. This because he's so sympathetic: After HT figured him out halfway through ItB and stopped making him an arrogant asshole, he became a true believer in the rightness of the cause, with sincerely good intentions for Tosevites as well as Lizards. He was even genuinely horrified by man's inhumanity to man and I think his resolve was steeled by seeing how badly the not-emperors mistreated each other and their own subjects. But while he believed in the ideals of the Conquest Fleet, he gradually lost all confidence in his government and his people's persistent refusal to adjust to a changed reality. :::::So as I say I like Atvar, but it does seem to me he made a lot of boneheaded tactical decisions. For all his insistence to Reffet and to members of Risson's court that he understood humans much better than any of them did by dint of his long experience--Well maybe he did, but he didn't understand them well enough. To the bitter end he kept leaving them with openings which they could unexpectedly wriggle out of. This was the last and, in light of the fact that the US was two generations away from supplanting the Race as the galaxy's dominant power, surely the most serious of all. You'd expect a competent leader's mistakes to grow less bad with time, but his kept getting worse. Turtle Fan 04:49, April 8, 2010 (UTC) :Public knowledge is known about Indianapolis' destruction, but does anyone in the general public knew about Sam's involvement in revealing the "who nuked the scaly civilians"? If so, he could have been met by a friggin, pissed off millions of Americans, especially if they had friends and relatives from the nuked city, in his front yard.--Drgyen 02:22, April 13, 2010 (UTC) ::His role was public knowledge. That was certainly clear by the end of HB. It's very hard for elected governments covered by a free press to keep stuff like that covered up for long, anyway. Turtle Fan 03:07, April 13, 2010 (UTC) :: ::All I know is once I read how he didn't really seem to care all my feelings for him in the previous books went out the door. I could care less what he had to say about anything really he was/is a traitor to the entire human race. If it is public like you say then he should meet a quite grisly or poetic justice end in the next book. Possible a nuked Lizard city while preaching his holier than thou morals.